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Johnnephew

@Johnnephew@dice.camp

President of Atlas Games®, TTRPG professional since 1986, amateur woodworker, would-be recycler of plastics. Duluth, Minnesota.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

Johnnephew , to random
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Working on designs for Vis tokens for Ars Magica. This is AI-assisted, but requires a lot of work in Gimp

Johnnephew OP ,
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@clarkvalentine @jmstar Now you guys sent me down a rabbit hole learning about the sonnenrad!

Apparently the Nazi one is supposed to use the Sig rune, like the SS logo. A historical antecedent that might be claimed for the Hermetic Magic symbol would be the Zierscheibe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zierscheibe), which is also evocative of the Art symbol for Perdo in the game.

SJohnRoss , (edited ) to random

So I've got this side project, scanning and preserving one of my earliest books, one I bought the rights to ages ago and never did anything with.

And making a decent scanned PDF that isn't crappity isn't hard, it turns out? I've got crisp 600 dpi pages, with spot color preserved, searchable, no muddy compression artifacts. Around 200 kilobytes per page.

Which means the publishers of a lot of scanned PDFs I've purchased have some shit to answer for. 😅

Johnnephew ,
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@SJohnRoss no idea, sadly

SJohnRoss , to random

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    Johnnephew ,
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    @SJohnRoss If you have a hankering for pop-ups, check these guys out: https://www.titansterrain.com/

    (Conflict of Interest Disclaimer: They are a fulfillment & warehousing client)

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    While I'm mucking about with ways to make my little chess dudes out of recycled plastic (I've been using a plaster-concrete concoction), I realised I could probably switch the process and make plaster molds, and slipcast the pieces.

    Which classes them up enough I'd likely feel good about selling them!

    Test mold #1 formed perfectly, though I forgot to add a well for extra slip....

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I am very curious to learn more about this process

    epidiah , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @epidiah Exciting times for our friends on the East Coast!

    https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74/executive

    Johnnephew ,
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    @epidiah Checking my handbook of signs of the apocalypse...next up is something about the sun disappearing in the middle of the day?

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I think this is a good analogy.

    Like blogging in the hands of an insightful journalist or amateur journalist, I think gen AI can be a tool that expands possibilities in valuable ways. But it also means that it becomes more difficult to discern value.

    In the past, the economic chokepoints in production and distribution (editorial choice in traditional media, for example) meant that the individual consumer had pre-screened choices. (Alt POV: info controlled by gatekeepers.)

    ericmpaq , to random
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    Day 66 of : Quill remembers how to craft potions & tinctures. To help, she casts her gluph of power. She does a good job with the oak wart but had some trouble with hazel root & mud cap. Her final potency is 5 for oak wart, 2 for hazel root, & 2 for mud cap.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @SJohnRoss @ericmpaq Getafix = drug dealer? Is Panoramix hinting at psychedelia?

    robindlaws , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @robindlaws is there going to be censorship of any haggis-critical material?

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    If someone properly kicks my ass in an online argument, fully backed up by clear facts, I will often change my mind!

    Probably the next day!

    And often crediting myself instead of the person who changed my mind!

    But I'm getting better: I used to ALWAYS credit myself, and didn't even realize that's what I was doing.

    So clearly I'm becoming a better person.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I feel seen

    Johnnephew , to random
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    Just as a "content warning," as I've been privately cautioned that "publicly messing around with an LLM trained off scraped data isn’t a good look for a publisher," I'm likely to continue talking about generative AI and experiments with it because part of the reason to have this, a personal Mastodon account, is to hash through things I'm thinking my way through in a place where I may get input from others. Don't feel bad about muting or unfollowing. This is a place of free association.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Open-licensing Ars Magica means that people WILL feed all of its text into large language models. So before actually doing the licensing, I need to work through the implications and consequences, and how I feel about them.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    I can't release something CC-BY-SA and add a condition "no using this with LLM."

    I could argue that the SA part means you can use it as a private source (e.g., load all the text on your Google Drive and tell Bard to refer to it), but have to share-alike the output or whatever you develop the output into.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Legal and ethical questions about LLMs and training are being argued today.

    It's icky that big companies basically scrape all of human communication to train an LLM and then sell access to it. Kind of like how it's icky that Disney takes the public domain and walls it off as private property.

    On the other hand, this EFF article by Kit Walsh gives me a lot to think about, with specific reference to Stable Diffiusion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    @kbg I am not a lawyer, but my gut agrees with you.

    I worry that if it settles somewhere else, it will be in a way that favors large corporate interests at the expense of the cultural commons and future creativity.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    @LeviKornelsen Good point!

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